Unused vacation, sick time expensive

STOCKTON - When former Stockton Police Chief Blair Ulring retired in 2011, he walked away with $413,836 in earnings for the year.

Scott Smith

STOCKTON - When former Stockton Police Chief Blair Ulring retired in 2011, he walked away with $413,836 in earnings for the year.

That sum didn't even make him the highest-paid Stockton employee.

Mike Niblock, the city's former director of community development, retired and then came back to work on special assignments, earning $436,086 for the year.

They both tripled their base pay by cashing in their unused vacation and sick time, what's called in city-salary parlance "sell backs" and "pay offs."

City officials overseeing the budget today admit that these figures are mind-boggling to the average working stiff. What's worse, the city paid these sums at the peak of its financial crisis leading to bankruptcy.

"I understand people's frustration," City Manager Bob Deis said.

But he added that the scenario creating these huge payouts has been corrected. The City Council in February 2012 temporarily froze lump-sum payouts in a desperate measure to stem the tide of departing employees and to conserve cash.

In 2011, the city paid a total of $6.5 million to a mass exodus of employees. With measures city leaders took, that dropped to $1.6 million in 2012.